Archive for July 10, 2018

They’ve been memorializing the five employees of the Capital Gazette who were shot in an act of mass murder two weeks ago in Annapolis, Md.

And in the last couple of days, they buried advertising assistant Rebecca Smith. And, as it turns out, Smith was a member of the American field hockey community. She played field hockey in the shadows of the smokestacks of the Bethlehem Steel plant as a member of Sparrows Point (Md.).

Smith was the first person in her family to attend college, attending Villa Julie College (now Stevenson University), and getting her degree in marketing. But sports were never too far from her. She threw herself into recreational softball and into keeping fit.

And now, weeks before she was scheduled to be married, she was taken by a madman with a weapon of mass destruction.

And that’s all sorts of wrong.

As I posited two weeks ago in Unfiltered, the Capital Gazette shootings ring personal for me. These are local, salt-of-the-earth journalists and people who rely on leads generated in the community for not only stories, but for advertising accounts, which Smith pursued.